Windows Longhorn had the worst code ever. This is not said by us, but by the legendary Microsoft engineer
A successor to Windows XP was created based on it, but it was a real chaos and a nightmare for developers.
Dave Cutler is more than just an engineer. This unknown legend of operating system development began his career in the 70s with projects such as RSX-11 and VMS. In the late 80s he signed a contract with Microsoft. lead the development of Windows NT, probably the most important operating system in Redmond’s history.
It didn’t end there, and Cutler later co-authored the birth of Azure and Microsoft’s cloud era, but all of these successes were punctuated by the occasional disaster.
And the biggest of them all, by far, was Windows Longhorn.
In a nine-minute excerpt from an interview with Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, Cutler explained how Windows Longhorn had ‘the worst code I’ve ever seen’.
In October 2003, Microsoft announced Windows Longhorn, an ambitious project aimed at improving the security of its operating systems and incorporating new features such as the promising WinFS file system or the new Avalon graphics subsystem.
This project started to go wrong very quickly. In 2004, there were alarming signs that development was in chaos. Microsoft revived the project to base it on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 code instead of Windows XP, and the result of this effort was the critically panned Windows Vista.
While XP’s launch was “generally successful,” Cutler explained in an interview, it was “messy” and the biggest problems were in security. And using this foundation turned out to be quite a challenge. With the help of AMD, Cutler tried to convince Microsoft to move to 64-bit development for servers and then desktop computers, and that’s when They encountered so many problems that they had to stop the project..
Windows XP’s security went from bad to terrible, and Cutler explained how “XP’s security became so bad that we had to actually stop (Longhorn’s) development and fix the bugs. My team fixed about 5,000 of them, we checked them all and found the code as if we had a shovel.”
That’s when he saw “the worst code I’ve ever seen, IME (input method editor) code that was being created in Japan. It was just terrible, I don’t care about mistakes at allSome of them were so huge that even his team couldn’t fix them, so we just “mitigated them as best we could.”
Image | Dave’s Garage
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